PUBLISH AND PERISH: Are Newspapers History?

The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages: 1851-2008 (2008). Introduction by
Bill Keller. New York, NY: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers.

Reviewed by Miles Beller

Whats black-and-white and not read all over?
Sadly, the daily newspaper. With the Internets ascendancy, print-on-paper journalism is
disintegrating; reduced to what some characterize as troubled technology, as outmoded as
chiseled tablets or scrolls of papyrus. Yes, The Times (as well as the Journal, the
Chronicle, the Examiner and the Post) are a changin.gentlemen start your eulogies.
Where once the dove-like rustle of broadsheets cooed the news, the icy stare of LCD
screens now command. Where once the union of writers and editors presented stories
with perspective and focus, bloggers and “citizen journalists” now vie for bandwidth via
bilious screeds and narcissistic eruptions. As paper-thin profits slice through newsrooms,
knifing the careers of journeymen reporters, a new class of commentator arises: every
man an ill-informed muckraker, every woman a carping correspondent. The ticks and the
quirks, the petty irritations and immeasurably small annoyances of millions are now
compulsively posted and social-networked. And as this sludgy electronic sea of
inconsequentialities pushes further, actual news is subsumed and relegated to endangered
specie.
More than two centuries ago, Thomas Jefferson expressed unstinting faith in
newspapers, writing that if faced with choosing a government with no newspapers or
newspapers minus a government he would “not hesitate to prefer the latter.” But would
Jefferson have so readily opted for this if he were marched before an iMac or a

Brenda Starr copyright Tribune Media Services
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Blackberry and made to receive his news from the Drudge Report (“Student arrested for
taking upskirt photos of teacher…”) or AOLs homepage (“Nude Madonna Photo Goes
for $37K”)? In fact, if Jefferson were fed a streaming diet of daily news transmitted by
the Internet, might he not agree with Googles chief executive, Eric Schmidt, that the
nets info flow can be more “cesspool” than news pool?
The sure shift in newsgathering and its delivery was recently brought home to me,
having had the chance to spend time with The New York Times: The Complete Front
Pages: 1851-2008 — an expansive 456-page book (which given its dimensions could,
itself, serve as a coffee table) accompanied by three white DVDs. Several months ago I
had been impressed with The Complete New Yorker; this a modest softcover also
accompanied by DVDs holding the magazines run from Harold Rosss startup in 1925,
to 2005 with David Remnick as editor. Here were the captivating covers, the cagey
cartoons, and the exhaustive profiles as well as everything in-between. Quite an
accomplishment. But every front page of the New York Times!
Make no mistake; The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages is not a
triumph in bulk but rather in scope, reaffirming the magnitude and the consequence of a
great daily. In no small measure The Complete Front Pages reveals how a true newspaper
serves as a journal of who we are, a diary of our collective experience. For a great
newspaper reflects the nations psyche; our aspirations and our misgivings, our hopes and
our hurts, where we wish to go and where we have regretted coming from. And here
permit me an indulgence, to note writer Nicholson Bakers efforts to insure that centuries
of original newsprint journals remain with us. In 1999, Baker established the nonprofit
American Newspaper Repository, this in response to an auction by the British Library
that was selling off a staggering amount of its original American newspaper holdings.
Baker subsequently bought other newspaper collections, which in 2004 were given to
Duke University with the requirement that this perishable history be kept safe and not
tampered with for perpetuity. Indeed, old newspapers are a national treasure, their
survival worth fighting for. Baker decisively explains the reason he and we must press for
preserving print journalism in his introduction to The World on Sunday: Graphic Art in
Joseph Pulitzers Newspaper (1898-1911). “A century ago, newspapers like the World,
the Chicago Tribune, the New York Tribune, and many others were everywhere and were
read by everyone; now they are almost nowhere; their historico-artifactual resplendence
and indispensability was, it seemed to me, beyond dispute.”
Publisher Philip Graham called newspapers the first rough draft of history. It is a
description that implicitly acknowledges the immediacy and the vitality skilled reporting
renders; writing that pushes to the center of things while pressing up against a deadline.
In fact, the very best reporting can be art. E.L. Doctorow admitted to a group of Neiman
Fellows that if he could write just one edition of The New York Times it would cap his
literary life.
Hey, hold on! Cant newspapers be parochial, petty, and dead wrong? In 2003 the
Norforlk Virginian-Pilot ran corrections to its 1903 account of the Wright Brothers
getting off the ground. And as determined by the Virginian-Pilots editors, the original
story contained scores of errors. In fact, even the headline was stunningly off, with its
declaration of “Flying Machine Soars Three Miles in Teeth of High Wind Over Sand
Hills and Waves at Kitty Hawk on Carolina Coast.” The Wright Brothers never made it
beyond the beach, and the longest flight accomplished that day was just 852 feet, hardly
three miles. Morever, the Virgian-Pilots acount was not based on a reporter on the scene,
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but from disjointed descriptions offered by Coast Guardsmen stationed nearby. In opting
for a journalistic flight of fancy, the Virginian-Pilot forced accuracy to crash land.
Perhaps the most infamous modern instance of a newspaper brokering in fiction
was 1980s Pulitzer-winning feature in the Washington Post about a drug addicted boy
named Jimmy. “Jimmy is 8 years old and a third-generation heroin addict, a precocious
little boy with sandy hair, velvety brown eyes and needle marks freckling the baby-smooth skin of his thin brown arms.” Riveting writing, but fiction not reporting. Little
Jimmy was an imaginary character concocted by journalist Janet Cooke. Once the hoax
was discovered, Cookes Pulitzer went pffffft and she left the paper. Apologizing for this
grave journalism transgression , a contrite Ben Bradlee, then the Posts executive editor,
cited credibility as a newspapers paramount virtue. For once a paper lost its integrity, the
resulting wounds, said Bradlee, were “grievous.”
In addition to mangling the facts and making stuff up, newspapers can suffer
wrenching dyslexia when reading the tea leaves of current events. A New York Times art
critic, reviewing Henri Matisse at the fabled New York Armory Show of 1913,
excoriated his work for reducing psychology “to a purely animal significance” and
“turning humanity back toward its brutish beginnings.” The usually puissant Walter
Lippmann judged Franklin Roosevelt as “a kind of amiable boyscout,” who really had no
grasp of “the great subjects which must concern the next President.” And the Chicago
Daily Tribune, announcing the winner of the 1948 Presidential election, shouted this
exquisitely wrong-headed headline high above the fold on page one: “Dewey Defeats
Truman.”
Will Rogers voiced a popular peeve about newspapers, saying, “I hope we never
live to see the day when a thing is as bad as some of our newspapers make it.” Rebecca
West assessed the essential activity of newspapering as “the ability to meet the challenge
of filling space.” And Norman Mailer, no slouch when it came to nonfiction writing,
believed that the very act of converting actualities into newsprint content was fated to
fail. “Once a newspaper touches a story,” Mailer warned, “the facts are lost forever, even
to the protagonists.” A recent argument against weeping over dying newspapers was even
made on The New York Timess own Op-Ed page by Michael Kinsley, a Time magazine
columnist and founding editor of the online magazine Slate. Kinsley dismissed ink-on-paper daily journalism as “an artifact from a time when chopping down trees was
essential to telling the news.”
My own long experience as a reporter, the formative years of which were spent at
the scrappy but now departed Los Angeles Herald Examiner, showed me the limits and
the latitude of newspaper writing. More than a few blockhead editors, claustrophobic
deadlines, and advancing battle fatigue in having to file the same formulaic stories week
after week (the names changed but structure and circumstance repeated) took a toll. Yet
there was satisfaction in seeing my name bylined over a story I knew I had written well,
had gotten right. Though the paper would be tossed that night, my story trashed and
discarded, there were times I had honestly learned something. I, myself, had been at the
center of things and had touched a small square of history. And this would be something I
would keep my whole life. I had talked to a mayor at City Hall, had been stared down by
a man on trial for attempted murder outside the courtroom, and had watched the back of a
Malibu home disappear into the Pacific during a record-breaking winter storm. I had sat
in a church where hundreds of policemen remembered a murdered friend and fellow
officer as bagpipes keened a piercing dirge, and I had flirted with all the members of a
famous girl band (well, the singer and lead guitarist, anyway). I had lived with runaways
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in a sullen flophouse on the edge of Hollywood, and I had driven long miles with
displaced GM factory workers relocating from Southgate to Oklahoma City. I had been a
newspaper reporter, and I had learned a thing or two about writing, about trying to see
something as truly and as honestly as I could. Today I see this active commitment to
getting it right while deepening ones skills in my nephew Tyler Hayden, who recently
began reporting and writing for the Santa Barbara Independent.
And to this end, Tyler is in good company. Newspaper writing informs many of
our most celebrated poets? novelists, and playwrights. Washington Irving, Walt Whitman,
Mark Twain and Willa Cather wrote for newspapers. John Steinbecks The Grapes of
Wrath grew out of a series he filed for The San Franciso News in 1936, sketching the
lives of “The Harvest Gypsies,” the migrant workers bucketing into California during the
Great Depression. As a 19 year-old reporter on the Kansas City Star, Ernest Hemingway
was forever influenced by the Stars style sheet. It required reporters to “Use short
sentences” and “Eliminate every single superfluous word.” These qualities would
become hallmarks of Hemingways mature style; his stark, direct fiction. A piece
attributed to Hemingway while working at the Star in 1918 for $15 a week already
suggests emotion and feeling rather than outrightly stating them. Titled “Mix War, Art
and Dancing,” this account speaks of soldiers at a dance up on the sixth floor of a fine
arts school while down below a lone prostitute “walked along the wet street-lamp
sidewalk through the sleet and snow.”
Another celebrated American writer, Carl Sandburg, also gained insight and
agility while a journalist. In addition to filing film reviews, Sandburg covered highly
charged social and political issues. In the summer of 1919, The Chicago Daily News sent
Sandburg, then 41, to investigate a race riot that had erupted on the shores of Lake
Michigan leaving 38 dead. Sandburgs story expressed the concerns of public officials,
political activists, and local church leaders, putting racial tensions into a perspective more
fully understood.
Surely memorable newspaper writing is not exclusive to the famous. Many
unsung scribes slogging away in obscurity have produced enduring journalism. In May
1931, an un-bylined reporter in a brief piece describing the “new view” from the top of
the just opened Empire State Building, conveyed more than statistics and facts. “In
Manhattan the tall buildings, which from the streets below appeared as monsters of steel
and stone, assumed a less awe-inspiring significance when viewed from above.” The
writer went on to say, “Central Park appeared as a flattened rectangle of earth and turf, a
welcomed relief from the stern irregularity of the skyline and the buildings which
hemmed in its lake and trees.” When the New York Post reported Franklin Roosevelts
death on April 13, 1945, an anonymous rewrite man inserted two lines into the
Pentagons daily list of casualties. Under the “Army-Navy Dead” appeared:
“ROOSEVELT, Franklin D. Commander-in-Chief, wife, Mrs. Anne Eleanor Roosevelt,
the White House.”
But Im straying from this critiques central concern. For the bold-faced headline
is assessing The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages: 1851 – 2008. And, truly,
its impressive. Not long ago, access to this mind-boggling mass of information
demanded a trudge to a librarys dark, airless microfilm room where stacks of reels
awaited. Now all you need do is step over to your computer. True, if a story falls inside
The Times that library trip remains mandatory. On the other hand, a full subscription to
the paper yields free online access to its entire contents. But lets stick to whats under
review.
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For starters, what other chronicle of the American adventure can claim to be
“The Paper of Record”? Whether politics or culture, sports or religion, science or
commerce, society or weather, The New York Times has been getting it all. Its front
pages have registered the murder of a President (“AWFUL EVENT: PRESIDENT
LINCOLN SHOT BY AN ASSASSIN, Saturday, April 15, 1865), the flocking of youth
to a spot called Woodstock (“300,000 at Folk-Rock Fair Camp Out in a Sea of Mud,”
Sunday, August 17, 1969), and the start of decoding our own hidden history (“Genetic
Code of Human Life Is Cracked by Scientists,” Tuesday, June 27, 2000).
A purely random romp through The Timess front pages finds Tunney defeating
Dempsey, Sacco and Vanzetti executed early one morning, President Truman sacking
General MacArthur, and a faltering Wall Street kick-starting the Fed to action. The big
book that comes packaged in this offering is organized chronologically into sections with
descriptive titles. For instance, “A Nation Divided” covers 1851 to 1865, while “Passion,
Pain And Progress” concerns 1968 to 1976. Short essays accompany each section, with
William Safire on “The Emancipation Proclamation,” Frank Rich considering “The Age
of Television,” and Thomas Friedman clocking in with “Noah and 9/11,” this a concise
meditation on the American mindset that appeared in The Times a year after the Twin
Towers were attacked.
Yes, The New York Times has been setting down in column inches (along with
some mighty telling pictures) the nations heartbeat, catching current events before they
harden into history. A look back at The Timess own past reveals an enterprise that, itself,
has made history. Begun as the New York Daily Times in the middle of the 19
th-century
by Henry J. Raymond, who also served as editor, the paper was generally conservative
with an accent on accuracy. After Raymond died in 1869, the daily tilted toward
activism. In the 1870s it advocated reforms and went after New York Citys corrupt
Tweed Ring. But the death of publisher George Jones in 1891 resulted in weaker
standards and falling circulation. Only after Adolph Ochs bought the paper in 1896 did
quality and readership rise. Ochs, in stating his goals for The Times, asserted that he
wanted his paper to “give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party,
sect, or interests involved.” while serving as “a forum for the consideration of all
questions of public importance.” In this way he hoped The Times would encourage
“intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.” In 1918 The Times won its first
Pulitzer for public service. The papers size and influence was reflected in a comment
reportedly offered by an Army official, who said The Times was “too big to read, too
important not to.”
Closer to our day, The Times caused a stir in 1971 with its printing of a series
centered on the “Pentagon Papers,” leaked secret reports exploring Americas
involvement in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. When the government under President
Nixon fought to block the series publication, the case went to the Supreme Court, where
the finding favored The Times. More Times milestones include creation of a respected
book review as well as a valued Sunday magazine. Subsequent innovations involved
launching specialty sections focused on the arts and science, as well as the home and
personal style.
Yet these changes and additions have not eclipsed the front page as The Timess
most significant part, influencing opinion worldwide. As executive editor Bill Keller
points out in his introduction to The Complete Front Pages “.Page One is still what
most stirs our ambition.” Keller also observes that even the relationship of one story to
another in the mosaic that is the front page can evoke meaning. By way of example, he
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talks about the March 21, 1933 edition, pointing out that while one of its front page
stories tells of newly elected President Franklin Roosevelts push to gain special powers
to defeat the Great Depression, “across the page (was) a report that Hitler was assuming
dictatorial control in Germany.” Indeed, for Keller, assembling the front page is the
essence of producing a newspaper. To this he adds that newspapering is more than a job,
believing that daily journalism serves as “a gathering place.where we pool our
information and invigorate our sense of community.” Still, when Keller weighs the
newspapers front page against the Internets homepage, he sees the former as
journalisms version of the record companies doomed vinyl.
Inarguably, there is about The Compete Front Pages an air of summation and
endings; a respectfully bound last will and testament occasioned by the expectation of
newspapers encroaching death. Heydays have passed, Rubicons breeched, the golden
age already dissembling into memory. In fact, some see the end as already here.
According to many top analysts, The New York Times Company fatally jeopardized its
future by shelling out $2.7 billion to buy back its own stock from 1998 to 2004, an
amount equal to three times the companys current capitalization. Moreover, ad revenue
for the Times Company (which in addition to The New York Times publishes The
Boston Globe and The international Herald Tribune) has dropped nearly 20 percent over
the last two years. In an attempt to gain much needed cash, The Times has been trying to
sell its sake in the Boston Red Sox as well as secure a sale-leaseback deal on its new
glittery 52-story high-rise headquarters in Manhattan designed by Renzo Piano. Other
ominous indicators include the Times Company slashing stock dividends by nearly three-quarters, and borrowing $250 million from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Hel? in a
deal that even a recent Times story described as consisting of “punishing terms.” These
extreme moves, however, have resulted in little more than a stopgap rescue. Later this
year, one of the Times Companys two revolving credit accounts expires, and this will
have the effect of restricting borrowing to $400 million. Even now The Times Company
owes $380 million, with debt payments of $99 million and $250 soon due.
Such grim financials, coupled with the avalanche of free online news services and
proliferation of devices that include Amazons Kindle and Sonys Reader seem to signal
finito for the fragile newspaper. And so it appears we are media GPS-ed to an Internet
future where broadcasting personal minutia and piddling private details is to be received
as big news. But as New Journalist Tom Wolfe once told fellow writer Paul Wilner, “I
know that when I read what someone has had for breakfast, I am reading a desperate
man.” Typing is not writing. Nitpicking is not an accounting of news.
As I moved through history on page one of The New York Times: The Complete
Front Pages: 1851-2008, the joy and the awe in revisiting the pulse-quickening past as
captured by keen-eyed reporters transcended technological paradoxes and implied obits.
True, the virtual conjuring of scanned front pages is no substitute for the touch and the
texture, the smell and the flutter, of original newsprint. But is there not something
wondrous about having history so tantalizingly close? On three white discs spin the
symphony of how we lived. Expectation, grief, retreat and renewal. The stories
materialize in big bold headlines; the past regained for us today, to feel and to
understand, to revisit once again.

Miles Beller has been honored by the Associated Press for feature writing, and is co-editor of American Datelines: Major News Stories from Colonial Times to the Present.

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